Tag Archives: racism

The Roots Of Our Polarization

There is an analytical rule–really, a problem-solving principle– called Occam’s Razor. It is sometimes called the principle of parsimony, and is basically a reminder that the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation.

A recent poll has confirmed my belief that there is a simple, albeit terrifying, explanation for America’s current deep polarization: White Christian Nationalism.

Although I have long believed that worldview to be the source of a lot of our current unrest, before this particular poll, I really had no clue just how deeply entrenched and widespread that worldview is.

A new survey finds that fewer than a third of Americans, or 29%, qualify as Christian nationalists, and of those, two-thirds define themselves as white evangelicals.

The survey of 6,212 Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution is the largest yet to gauge the size and scope of Christian nationalist beliefs.

The study found–unsurprisingly–that Christian nationalists tend to be older (some two-thirds are over the age of 50). They are also far less educated than other Americans. At most,  20% of Christian nationalism supporters have a four-year college degree, far fewer than the 79% of respondents who were labeled “skeptics” because they rejected the principles of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism as a worldview is not new but the term is. Indeed, a third of respondents said they had not heard of the term. For that reason, it’s impossible to say whether the ranks of Christian nationalists have grown over time.

In their book “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Sam Perry found that about 20% of Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalist ideas. The PRRI survey is more in line with a 2021 Pew Research survey that found that 10% of Americans are what Pew identified as hard-core “faith and flag” conservatives.

The survey did confirm that Americans overall reject a Christian nationalist worldview by a ratio of 2 to 1.

In an essay for the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin considered the implications of the survey. As she noted, most of us have only a vague understanding of the term.

When you hear the phrase “Christian nationalists,” you might think of antiabortion conservatives who are upset about the phrase “Happy Holidays” and embrace a vaguely “America First” way of thinking. But according to a Public Religion Research Institute-Brookings Institution poll released Wednesday, Christian nationalists in fact harbor a set of extreme beliefs at odds with pluralistic democracy. The findings will alarm you.

Rubin enumerated the beliefs held by these adherents:

“The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.”
“U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.”
“If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”
“Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.”
“God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

PRRI found that 10 percent (“adherents”) of American adults believe in these ideas overwhelmingly or completely; 19 percent agree but not completely (“sympathizers”); 39 percent disagree (“skeptics”) but not completely; and 29 percent disagree completely (“rejecters”).

Nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants are Christian Nationalists–either sympathizers (35%) or adherents (29%).” More troubling, the poll found that thirty-five percent of all Whites are adherents. 

Those percentages mean that tens of millions of Americans hold these views. And as the poll confirmed, those Americans are overwhelmingly Republican.  Republicans (21%) were found to be about four times as likely as Democrats (5%) or independents (6%) to be Christian nationalists.

Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad.

 There are fewer adherents and sympathizers among younger Americans. “More than seven in ten Americans ages 18-29 (37% skeptics, 42% rejecters) and ages 30-49 (37% skeptics, 35% rejecters) lean toward opposing Christian nationalism.” Support is also inversely related to educational attainment.

You will not be surprised to discover the depths of racism and racial grievance among these adherents. A stunning 83 percent of them think Whites are being discriminated against, and that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.”

More than 70 percent embrace replacement theory, and nearly one-quarter say that Jews hold too many positions of power; 44 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. More than 65 percent agree that Muslims from some countries should be banned. Almost 70 percent believe “the husband is the head of the household in ‘a truly Christian family’ and his wife submits to his leadership.”

If you think this sounds like MAGA tripe, you’re right. This is the hardcore MAGA base. More alarming: “Nearly six in ten QAnon believers are also either Christian nationalism sympathizers (29%) or adherents (29%).”

Rubin says that believers in American values have our work cut out for us.

No kidding.

Comments

An Ugly Omen

I’ll begin today’s post with a link to this report from The Week, but I’m reasonably certain that everyone reading this blog has already encountered reports about Ron. DeSantis’ most recent assault on the Constitution.

On the remote chance that you were vacationing in Bora Bora or blissfully hidden in an Amazon forest, I’ll explain: DeSantis refused to allow Florida schools to use a new Advanced Placement course in African-American studies, accusing it of being “woke.”

DeSantis has engaged in an unremitting war against “woke-ness”–otherwise described as any recognition that Black, Brown and LGBTQ people are citizens who are entitled to be treated as civic equals. My initial reaction to this latest eruption of racism in an effort to appeal to the increasingly racist GOP base was just to shake my head at this latest effort to protect Florida school kids from the evils of education.

Then came the reports prompting today’s headline–the utter capitulation of the College Board.

The alarming part of this story is that the College Board “completely bowed to his demands — and extremely quickly at that!” The nonprofit’s insistence that politics played no part in the decision is bunk. According to The New York Times, the writers and academics barred from the curriculum include Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a Columbia professor whose work has been “foundational in critical race theory,” and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, “who has made a strong case for reparations.” More than 200 African American studies teachers said in a Medium post this gutting of the course amounts to “censorship and a frontal attack on academic freedom… Happy Black History Month.”

As Robert Kuttner put it in Kuttner on Tap in The American Prospect, DeSantis and the College Board were “enabling each others corruption.”

On Wednesday, after a threat from Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban the new Advanced Placement curriculum on African American studies in the state of Florida, the College Board released a watered-down version. The new curriculum is mainly historical. It deletes critical race theory and expunges or minimizes references to Black Lives Matter and the issues of reparations and Black incarceration. Some issues are removed from the AP curriculum entirely; others are left as optional topics for papers. The course still covers the slave trade and the civil rights movement but excises the work of several Black radical scholars.

Talk about following the money!

Like most Americans, I had previously been unaware that the AP courses offered to high school students capable of engaging with a more challenging curriculum are a branded product of the College Board. 

As Kuttner explained,

The College Board is a classic case of a large nonprofit that behaves exactly like a profit-maximizing business. Its annual budget is about a billion dollars a year, and according to its most recent tax filings, Coleman, its CEO, was paid $2.849 million in total compensation in 2020, which included $1.6 million in bonus and incentive compensation.

It turns out that the College Board’s income comes almost entirely from two sources: the fees it collects from SAT exams, and the money it makes from AP classes–licensing fees for use of the curricula and charges for the AP tests that allow students to earn early college credits.

But the SATs are on the ropes. Thanks to a long-standing campaign against the overuse of standardized testing by FairTest and other critics, at least 1,835 colleges and universities, a majority of all higher-education institutions, now either don’t use the SAT or make it optional. Its total revenue dropped from $1.1 billion in 2019 to $779 million in 2020, the year of its most recent tax filing. So the College Board is now even more reliant on AP curricula and tests.

That reliance explains a lot. According to Kuttner, there are currently 38 AP courses, including human geography, psychology, art history, and Japanese culture and language. The AP African American studies curriculum was new, poised to be launched in the 2023-2024 school year.

I had also been unaware of a growing movement to replace the College Board’s AP classes with “home-grown” curricula; the article quoted one principal explaining that having his own  advanced courses allows his school to be creative in curriculum, instruction, and assessment, and to respond to student interests.

Parents opposed to substituting local curricula worry about college acceptances in the absence of the familiar College Board classes. Kuttner notes that their worry “is fomented by that other famously corrupted institution, the U.S. News rankings. In ranking high schools, one major U.S. News weighting factor is how many kids take AP courses—”a perfect symbiosis between two unsavory education players.”

This “backstory” goes a long way to explain the College Board’s craven capitulation to the censors of the far right. It also strips away any belief that the Board’s mission is education.

It’s profit.

Comments

Behavior Versus Identity

Last Sunday, I was a guest in an adult class at St. Luke’s United Methodist church.  The class wanted to discuss the recent, disturbing rise in anti-Semitism. (St. Luke’s is one of the local churches in my “good guys–actual Christians” column.)

The format was informal–Q and A– but I did begin by suggesting that, before embarking on discussion, it was important to distinguish between hatred and ignorance.

As I explained, when I was young, growing up in one of only 30 Jewish families in Anderson, Indiana, most of what I encountered was ignorance:  I was asked things like “Do Jews have tails?”  and “Do Jews live in houses like real people?” But there was also animus: in third grade, a playmate informed me that “My parents said I can’t play with you because you’re a dirty Jew.”

It’s also important to distinguish between criticisms of Israeli actions/politics and anti-Semitism. Criticizing Israel’s government or policies is not anti-Semitic (plenty of American Jews are appalled by Netanyahu). That said, criticisms of Israel grounded in longstanding anti-Jewish tropes are anti-Semitic.

In the United States, citizens are supposed to be judged on our behavior, not our identities. Today’s polarization is to a great extent a fight between Americans who want their countrymen to live up to that principle and those who defend negative stereotypes based on religion, sexual orientation and skin color.

Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews because we’re Jews.

In The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport’s seminal book about the roots of bigotry, published in 1954, Allport pointed out that most  prejudices come from ignorance–the relatively unthinking acceptance of what “everyone knows.” Jews are “sharp” businessmen, blacks are lazy, women are emotional and illogical. Most people aren’t emotionally invested in these negative social stereotypes, and Allport thought the misconceptions would erode once there was greater familiarity and more contact.

Allport’s great contribution was to distinguish between prejudices that were simply an outgrowth of widely held–albeit inaccurate and unfair– social attitudes and those that were central to an individual’s identity. He found that most people who expressed bigotry against blacks or Jews (then the most frequent targets) were not invested in their negative opinions –they had simply accepted common stereotypes about “others,” and they could be educated to change what were essentially casual beliefs they had never really examined.

But there was, he found, another category. It was much smaller, but also much more troubling. These were individuals that Allport—who founded the discipline of social psychology—described as invested in their bigotries. For whatever reason—bad toilet training, lack of parental affection, abuse—their belief in the inferiority of designated “others” had become absolutely central to their personalities. Education and contact would have no effect at all on their attitudes.

Allport recognized that we all have a fundamental human desire for status and upward mobility, and that desire makes a certain amount of what we might call “identity-based one-upsmanship” inevitable. He also recognized that such prejudices are heightened during times of rapid social change.

As the Roman Empire crumbled, Christians were more frequently fed to the lions; in the forties and fifties, whenever the cotton business in the American south slumped, lynchings increased; when forest fires swept across Maine in 1947, many citizens blamed the Communists. As Allport put it, “whenever anxiety increases, accompanied by a loss of predictability in life, people tend to define their deteriorated situations in terms of scapegoats.”

In other words, we want to blame our anxieties on someone or something we can identify—we channel our aggressions against an outsider, an “other.”

Of course, there are many numerical minorities that are not usually chosen as scapegoats. Why this group and not that one?  Allport notes that the nearest thing to an “all-purpose” scapegoat is a group that has a degree of permanence and stability. So while a few Macedonians in Lexington, Kentucky (assuming there have ever been any) might exhibit cultural differences that arouse majority hostility for a time, there really isn’t any basis for a good, persistent mythology about Macedonians in general, and even if there were, the next generation is likely to be so Americanized as to be indistinguishable from others who live in Lexington.

Jews, blacks and gays, however (along with women) have always been around, and probably always will be. And in all likelihood, we’ll all continue to be sufficiently different to be useful for scapegoat purposes.

Undoubtedly, there will always be emotionally-unhealthy people who need someone or something to blame for the disappointments in their lives. My conversation with the lovely folks at church last Sunday reminded me that there are also a lot of good people “out there.”

At times like this, that’s comforting to know.

Comments

Downtown

As regular readers have undoubtedly noticed, I frequently use this blog as a platform to vent–and that’s what I plan to do today. Usually, my rants are political, but despite political overtones, this one is personal.

First, some background.

I use Facebook primarily as a method for “pushing out” this blog–I very rarely post about personal matters, and because I am essentially viewing the site as a marketing tool, I have accepted lots of Facebook “friends” I’ve never met. Recently, one of them posted about the prosecutor’s race in my county, and that led to a string of dismissive (and easily disproven) comments about crime and downtown Indianapolis.

I have lived in downtown’s historic neighborhoods since 1980, and eighteen months ago, my husband and I downsized to an apartment in the heart of downtown’s central business district.

I now live barely two blocks from a Starbucks that the company is closing, a decision accompanied by pious declarations to the effect that closure was impelled by concerns for customer safety. Believing that excuse requires ignoring contemporaneous Starbucks closures in SIXTEEN other cities, and the fact that safety concerns seem not to have affected the other NINE downtown Starbucks locations. (Given the enormous number of competing coffee shops operating in just the Mile Square, my guess is over-saturation…)

Several people commenting on the post used the Starbucks closure to assert that downtown Indianapolis is not only unsafe, but–and I quote– a “shithole.”

Let me describe that “shithole” for those who don’t live in my neighborhood.

Saturday night, I attended an event at the downtown History Center. On my way home (four blocks), I passed restaurants filled to overflowing with diners inside and out (it was still a balmy evening, and downtown is blessed with numerous eateries offering outside dining.) Throngs of young couples were strolling up and down Massachusetts Avenue–a revitalized stretch of street hosting bars, restaurants, retail shops and theaters– all of which my husband and I frequent.

On foot.  We also walk two blocks to our preferred grocery, cleaners and hardware store…

Counterintuitively for a “shithole,” downtown Indianapolis attracts ongoing construction of apartment complexes and condominiums. People keep moving downtown to occupy them. (For the past few years, new construction has been so constant my husband and I joke as we pass a new complex: “Gee–that wasn’t there last Tuesday!”) As a recent report from the Indianapolis Star put it, renters and buyers continue to show a “high demand for Downtown living, a trend driven by amenities such as walkable streets, contemporary restaurants and bustling nightlife.”

If there’s a legitimate concern about downtown living, it’s the cost:a lot of  people are paying top dollar to enjoy the ambience and amenities of our downtown “shithole.”

Visit the website for Downtown Indy and find lists of residential options (both affordable and “wow, that’s pricey”) along with lists of the dozens of festivals, venues and events enjoyed by the 30,000+ of us who currently live downtown– as well as the thousands who come down to attend  them.

Indianapolis does have a crime problem–as most cities do–but it is primarily located in outer, impoverished neighborhoods. 

That said, I’m pretty sure I know what accounts for the ignorant accusations about downtown Indy. 

When I look at the throngs of people on the streets, most are young, and many are Black, Brown or Asian. A number of couples are interracial.  Unfortunately, depressing numbers of  Americans continue to equate nonwhite races with crime and decay. I’d be willing to bet good money that the people posting sneering comments about downtown Indianapolis hold stereotypes that equate “downtown” with “ghetto” and “scary.”

Prejudice can work both ways, of course.

For years, when my husband and I would drive past those grim, cookie-cutter, tree-less suburban developments that clearly require long commutes to work or shop, he would observe that “this is the environment people are willing to accept in order to avoid Black neighbors.” I would have to remind him that not every resident of suburbia or exurbia is a bigot–that there are non-racist reasons nice people might want a big yard or a quiet neighborhood.

I’ll end this screed by taking my own advice, and conceding that downtown living isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The vitality, walkability and street life I treasure can be off-putting to others, and those differences are just differences–they don’t necessarily reflect ignorance or prejudice.

On the other hand, when someone describes the center of my city–my neighborhood–in demonstrably inaccurate, pejorative terms, I’m pretty confident I know where that opinion comes from. And it isn’t pretty.

It’s just one more data point demonstrating the prevalence and persistence of  American racism.

Comments

Accounting For MAGA

In a recent newsletter from The Atlantic, Tom Nichols echoed a frustration of my own. He wrote that, in his lifetime, he’d seen” polio defeated and smallpox eradicated. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead—and still dying—because they refused a lifesaving vaccine as a test of their political loyalty to an ignoramus.”

Ever since 2016, a significant percentage of my posts have revolved around the reality (or actually, the unreality) of that political loyalty, and my inability to understand what–other than racial grievance–might account for it.  Study after study, however, has confirmed that it is, indeed, racism that explains support for Trump and the MAGA movement.

The Guardian recently published an article building on that research. The author began by commenting on President Biden’s forceful condemnation of Trump and MAGA, and as he noted, that attribution was correct —so far as it went.

The deeper, more longstanding threat, however, was articulated by historian Taylor Branch in a 2018 conversation with author Isabel Wilkerson recounted in Wilkerson’s book Caste. As they discussed how the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump was part of the backlash to the country’s growing racial diversity, Branch noted that, “people said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country”. He went on to add, “the real question would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

 Whiteness is the deeper threat because championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful. People forget that Trump was not particularly well-regarded before he started attacking Mexican immigrants and signaling to white people that he would be the defender of their way of life. In the months before he launched his campaign, he was polling at just 4% in the May 2015 ABC/Washington Post poll. After stirring the racial resentment pot, his popularity took off, growing exponentially in a matter of weeks and propelling him to the front of the pack by mid-July 2015 when he commanded support of 24% of voters, far ahead of all the other Republican candidates.

Of course, Trump’s discovery of the power of racism is nothing new. (That’s why the Right doesn’t want accurate history taught in our schools.) The author quoted George Wallace’s epiphany:  “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about n—–s – and they stomped the floor.”

People who’d dismissed Trump as a loudmouth buffoon “stomped the floor” when he began talking about (brown) Mexicans and Muslims.

The article reminded readers of Wallace, Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and the fact that David Duke–an “out and proud” Klansman–had attracted the support of 44% of Louisiana’s voters when he ran for the U.S. Senate.

The good news is that the proponents of whiteness do not command majority support. The original Confederates themselves were in the minority and represented just 11% of the country’s white population. People who enjoy majority support have no need to unleash fusillades of voter suppression legislation in the states with the largest numbers of people of color. Yet, from the grandfather clauses of the 1800s to the restrictive voting laws passed last year in the south and south-west, we are seeing an unrelenting practice of trying to depress and destroy democracy by engaging in what the writer Ron Brownstein has described as, “stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change”.

It’s one thing to confirm that a majority of Americans aren’t racist. It’s another thing to ensure that the people in that majority turn out to vote. As the author says,

In order to defend democracy and win the fight for the soul of the nation, two things must happen. One is to make massive investments in the people and organizations working to expand voting and civic participation. Coalitions like America Votes Georgia and Arizona Wins played critical roles in bringing hundreds of thousands of people of color into the electorate, helping to transform those former Confederate bastions.

We also need to “name and shame” the numerous political figures who are appealing to racist sentiments in order to turn out their supporters. Too many liberals shrink from calling out those who are trafficking in racism–it seems so uncivil. But racism is also uncivil–and far more dangerous.

To ultimately prevail in this defense of our democracy, we must clearly understand the underlying forces imperiling the nation, name the nature of the opposition, and summon the majority of Americans to unapologetically affirm that this is a multi-racial country.

This is a test, and we cannot afford to fail.

Comments